The New Orleans Film Festival

The 20th New Orleans Film Festival screens feature films,
documentaries, short and experimental works, including some world and
regional premieres. Richard Linklater will attend the opening night
screening of his most recent release, Me and Orson Welles, and
he will be featured in an interview session Saturday. The festival also
screens his 1993 film Dazed and Confused. Major new films
include Precious, The Young Victoria and Bad
Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage.
Reviews of several feature documentaries follow. For details about all
films, schedules and locations, visit www.neworleansfilmfest.com.

The Yes Men Fix the World

4:15 p.m. Saturday

Prytania Theatre

The Yes Men Fix the World is not an accurate title. New
Orleanians may remember when the two pranksters appeared at a
post-Katrina rebuilding conference posing as HUD officials (pictured)
and announced a reversal in policy and the reopening of the Lafitte
public housing development. The hoax was exposed within hours. Lafitte
residents were not readmitted.

In 2004, the Yes Men went on BBC on the 20th anniversary
of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal (which left 5,000 dead and
100,000 seriously ill) and announced Dow, which bought Union Carbide,
had set aside $12 billion to compensate victims and clean up the
still-toxic facility. Within hours they were exposed as frauds, but not
before Dow's stock dipped 3 percent in value.

In those and other cases chronicled in the film, the Yes
Men succeed in raising awareness rather than resolving problems. Andy
Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno string a narrative through some of their
more inspired stunts, from crashing World Trade Organization events, to
posing as HUD spokesmen to climate change activism. What's most
stunning is not that they infiltrate corporate events or (at least
initially) fool media organizations, it's that so few people question
their outrageous pronouncements. One group of disaster conference
attendees listen eagerly as Bichlbaum describes the biblical flood as a
boon for Noah, who gained "a monopoly on the world's animals."

It's funny and sometimes so sad it's funny. But the Yes
Men have a fairly earnest point: they're just two guys; if more people
stood up and demanded change, it would be easy to achieve. Bonanno will
attend the screening. — Will Coviello

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos

5:30 p.m. Sat.

Canal Place Cinema IV

Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond used their cameras in
revolutionary ways, but in two very different senses. They filmed the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 before fleeing the country. And they
ended up in Hollywood, where their work became part of a brilliant era
of American moviemaking.

No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos tracks
the careers of the two film-school students who filmed the Russian
suppression of revolt in Budapest. They soon fled to Austria, and
footage of the carnage aired around the world.

Kovacs and Zsigmond sought asylum in the United States
and eventually landed in Hollywood. They had to start by taking jobs
shooting baby portraits and then advanced from early nude films to the
horror genre to biker flicks — a no-to-low budget ladder of
schlock. Not being constrained by the studio system, however, they were
free to improvise. They shot scenes on California highways from moving
vehicles. A few better-connected filmmakers noticed. Dennis Hopper,
Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson attended a screening and decided they
wanted the same look for their upcoming film, Easy Rider
(1969).

Kovacs and Zsigmond both had an aptitude for capturing
light on film. They were recruited for work on landmark movies in a new
movement in American cinema. They handled the cinematography for Robert
Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Paper Moon
(1973), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), The Deer
Hunter (1978), Frances (1982), Ghostbusters (1984)
and many other remarkable films.

No Subtitles touches on their friendship, the
ordeal of their escape from Hungary and their storied artistic careers.
By the end, director James Chressanthis becomes preoccupied with
filmmaking shoptalk offered by Hollywood heavyweights. But Zsigmond
laughs that he was fired from the set of Close Encounters at
least six times. Losing a job clearly wasn't the worst thing he ever
had to face. — Coviello

It Might Get Loud

10:15 p.m. Sat.

Canal Place Cinema IV

What happens when three guitar gods — Jimmy Page (Led
Zeppelin), the Edge (U2) and Jack White (White Stripes) — get
together for a candid-camera joint biopic and baton-passing,
no-holds-barred jam session? "Probably a fistfight," White jokes at the
start of Davis Guggenheim's It Might Get Loud, but he couldn't
be more off-key. A rare and unabashed love-fest, some silly Guitar
Center fetishizing ("The whole aroma of it — it's like a woman,
you know?" the Edge gushes over sinuous six-string pornography) and an
appropriate genuflection by the filmmaker would've been better
guesses.

An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim's Oscar-winning
2006 documentary, built a disquieting argument for the dangers of
global warming around an Al Gore PowerPoint presentation. So you can
imagine the visceral thrills he milks here out of a trio of the
best-known bad boys in rock history. Jumping between past and
present-day London, Detroit and Dublin, Guggenheim digs up the roots of
his three subjects and their roads to superstardom.

Not surprising, each follows his musical arc to a T.
White is a fiery throwback who leaves his fretboard bloodied and likens
technology to a disease. His origin story is the most amusing: rocking
out in a furniture store (band name: the Upholsterers) and summoning
his beloved blues mythology with a 9-year-old Mini-Me in early
segments. (Their stomping duet of Walter Vinson's "Sittin' on Top of
the World" is one of the film's many performance highlights.) Weeping
about the death of guitar heroes during This is Spinal Tap ("It
was so close to the truth"), checking his BlackBerry while doing yoga,
the Edge seems an ever-sanctimonious pedal pusher — until his
chilling "Sunday Bloody Sunday" refrains are juxtaposed with images of
war-torn Ireland.

But the unmasking (or hair-parting, as it were) of Page
alone is worth the price of admission. Whether muscling up riffs or
narrating stock footage, the dapper Englishman is delightful as he
recounts playing skiffle as a pup ("rock 'n' roll breastfeeding"),
quitting music to pursue painting and, somehow, still ending up
onstage, fingering a double-necked Gibson next to a yelping Robert
Plant. By the time they're all strumming acoustics, harmonizing "Take a
load off, Fanny" for a hair-raising cover of the Band's "The Weight,"
any cock-rock posturing has given way to a cross-generational
"Kumbaya." — Noah Bonaparte Pais

Best Worst Movie

10:15 p.m. Saturday

Prytania Theatre

Troll 2

Midnight Saturday

Prytania Theatre

The relentlessly gregarious George Hardy, a dentist from Lake
Martin, Ala., has starred in two films. He didn't see the first one,
Troll 2 (1989) until 2006, and in a scene in the second film,
Best Worst Movie, he is told by a video-rental-store clerk that
he can find the first one in the "Holy F—king Shitty"
section.

In 1989, Hardy took three weeks out from a dental
residency in Utah to act in Troll 2. Italian director Claudio
Fragrasso and most of his crew spoke little English. Fragrasso's wife
wrote the script in which she essentially used a vampire tale as a
model for a story about vegetarian goblins hungry for biomatter. In the
film, Best Worst director Michael Paul Stephenson was cast as a
little boy who is guided by the ghost of his dead grandfather to try to
save his family from being turned into plants. The character General
Store Owner was a man on furlough from mental treatment looking for
something to do. And — not that it matters — but there are
no trolls in the movie, and it is completely unrelated to the movie
Troll.

Add it all up and you have a cult classic. Via the
Internet, Hardy learned about a cast reunion and reconnected with
several members in 2006. Then he talked with Stephenson, who did not
attend the reunion but had a successful film production career in Los
Angeles. They decided to document the cult following. But what drives
Best Worst Movie is the effusive good will and charisma of
Hardy. A former Auburn cheerleader, he loves to be in front of a crowd.
He and Stephenson set up a series of Troll 2 screenings across
the country and filmed cheering fans as Hardy reenacted scenes with
them and delivered classically bad lines ("You can't piss on
hospitality, I won't allow it.").

Dissecting the disaster of Troll 2 is funny, but
Best Worst is really about Hardy's quirky victory lap in front
of adoring fans. Fragrasso's resentment of the laughter helps focus the
love/hate response to an abysmal film that's only becoming more
popular. Hardy will attend the screening. — Coviello